THE CHRISTIAN AFRIKANERS - The Works of F. N. Lee

But the only one they both appeal to and agree was fundamentally important, was Augustine ofHippo.So what you have in Africa in these early Christian centuries -- in Northeast Africa (in Egypt), andin Northwest Africa in Carthage (in what is now Tunisia and Algeria), and also further down inNortheast Africa at Ethiopia -- is the development of three pretty solid Christian centres.Sad to relate, however, from 620 AD onward, Mohammed almost totally destroyed all of theChristianity that had been built up in Africa. He sent his armies forth from Arabia throughoutEgypt, cutting down and destroying and forcibly threatening the Christians there. Only the mosthardy ones held on to the Christian faith. They were terribly discriminated against, and lost theirpositions of power. Those Moslems gravely ravaged Christianity in Egypt. They totally annihilatedthe Christian communities in Northwest Africa, which had been perhaps the strongest Christiancommunities in the world at that time. Mercifully, Islam did not at that stage make any dentwhatsoever into what is now Ethiopia -- although in subsequent centuries, the process of the spreadof Mohammedanism even into that area began to increase.It was a catastrophe for the Christian churches, to be decimated in their greatest strongholds inNortheast and Northwest Africa. But Christianity does not die easily. God had begun the of Africain the north. After this temporary setback, He would later begin its re-christianisation. But thistime, from the south and through the agency not of Semites but of Japhethites - Caucasian childrenof Japheth who would arrive there round about 1650.Meantime, Islam consolidated its hold over the whole of North Africa. It filtered down reasonablyfast, through the Nile Valley. If surrounded Ethiopia, as a semi-Christian preserve of a veryritualistic nature. It cut Ethiopia off from influencing other areas in Africa as Islam movedsouthward throughout what is now Kenya and Uganda (converting many Black pagans to Islam inits wake).At a slower rate, Islam seems to have filtered southward also from Northwest Africa -- right acrossthe Sahara desert by way of the caravan trains travelling into the north of what is now Mali andNigeria. It then converted to Islam not merely Semites but Hamites -- non-Arab Black people orNegroes. They then developed rather strong Negro Moslem Governments in what is now thesouthern edge of the Sahara desert in West Africa. From there, they moved down at a somewhatslower pace throughout areas such as Chad, Equatorial Africa, and (very marginally) through theCongo.They did not then, however, move any farther south of that area. Yet they made a further push,perhaps in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- through Uganda into Tanzania. There, theMoslem towns of Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam were established. Dar-es-Salaam, one of the chieftowns in what is today Tanzania, is an Arabic name meaning "the Place (or the stronghold) ofIslam."That is indeed just what it became. Indeed, off the coast lay Zanzibar -- the island where ArabicMoslem slave-traders used to come with their slave-ships, down the eastern coast of Africa. Theyeither forcibly converted Black pagans to Islam, long before Whites got there -- or otherwise theycarried them off into slavery. In that way, they introduced many Black people even into Arabia.This then is the picture we have of Africa, just before the Whites went there to the extreme south.For there was a movement of Arabic Mohammedanism, especially in East Africa. It was headedsouthbound and was promoted not only by Arabs but also by Black Moslems. It was especiallypromoted by non-Black Arab slave-traders, as they moved on down through Tanzania into what is